Not every application is designed to leverage a load balancer. Early load balancing solutions capitalized on this fact - which may seem odd. The solution to the supportability issue creates new opportunity; we'll look at some examples here. Adjusting application behaviors quickly becomes a powerful tool when enhancing …

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GitOps GitOps, a term coined in 2017, describes the practice of performing infrastructure operations from a Git repository. In this practice, we easily develop the ability to re-deploy any broken infrastructure (like application managers), but that doesn't really help infrastructure engineers. From the perspective of …

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Idempotence and Declarative Methods - not just buzzwords Idempotence Coined by Benjamin Peirce, this term indicates that a mathematical operation will produce a consistent result, even with repetition. Idempotence is much more complicated subject in mathematics and computer science. IT and DevOps use a simplified …

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Note: This feature has been deprecated by VMware NSX-T 3.2 has been released, and has a ton of spiffy features. The NSX ALB integration is particularly neat, but while repeatedly (repeatably) breaking the integration to learn more about it, I ran into this error: When deploying NSX ALB appliances from the NSX Manager, …

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Have you ever seen this error before? This is a really important issue in enterprise infrastructure because unauthenticated TLS connections teach our end users to be complacent and ignore this error. TLS Authentication SSL/TLS for internal enterprise administration typically only addresses the confidentiality aspects …

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Cryptographic security is an important aspect of hosting any business-critical service. When hosting a public service secured by TLS, it is important to strike a balance between compatibility (The Availability aspect of CIA), and strong cryptography (the Integrity or Authentication and Confidentiality aspects of CIA). …

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Note: I created a common baseline for pre-requisites in this previous post. We'll be following VMware's Avi + NSX-T Design guide. This will be a complete re-install. Avi Vantage appears to develop some tight coupling issues with using the same vCenter for both Layer 2 and NSX-T deployments - which is not an issue that …

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TL;DR If you see either of these errors, check grep 'ERROR' /opt/avi/log/cc_agent_go_{{ cloud }} for the potential cause. In my case, the / character was not correctly processed by Avi's Golang client (facing vCenter). The Problem When trying to configure NSX ALB + NSX-T on my home lab, I am presented nothing but the …

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NSX Advanced Load Balancer - Logging and Troubleshooting Cheat Sheet Get into the OS Shell (all elements) 1sudo su Controller Log Locations Note: Everything in /var/lib/avi/logs is managed by Elasticsearch. I wouldn't mess with it. Events published to the GUI: /var/lib/avi/logs/ALL-EVENTS/ The primary log directory for …

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Pre-Requisites Before beginning the Avi installer, I configured the following in my environment: Management Segment (NSX-T Overlay). This is set up with DHCP for quick automatic provisioning - no ephemeral addresses required Data Segments (NSX-T Overlay). Avi will build direct routes to IPs in this network for vIP …

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